It was the crack heard 'round the world. Honestly, if you were watching TV in October 2016, you probably remember exactly where you were when Negan’s bat, Lucille, finally landed. For months, fans had been agonizing over a cliffhanger that felt like a personal insult. Everyone wanted to know: does Glenn in Walking Dead die, or was that just another one of the show's infamous fake-outs?
He died. And it was arguably the most brutal, stomach-turning moment in the history of basic cable.
People didn't just lose a character; they lost the "soul" of the show. Glenn Rhee, played with incredible heart by Steven Yeun, wasn't just a survivor. He was the guy who stayed good when the world turned rotten. When he went out, a huge chunk of the audience went with him, literally switching off their TVs and never coming back. Even now, years later, the conversation about how—and why—Glenn had to die is still one of the most heated debates in the fandom.
The Night Everything Changed: Season 7, Episode 1
Let’s get the facts straight. Glenn dies in the Season 7 premiere, titled "The Day Will Come When You Won't Be." But the trauma actually started in the Season 6 finale. We saw Negan line up our favorite survivors, play a terrifying game of "eeny, meeny, miny, moe," and then the camera shifted to a first-person perspective as the bat came down.
📖 Related: The Cowgirl Parade Bubble Guppies Episode Is Actually Great Preschool TV
Screen went black. Fans went nuts.
Fast forward to the premiere. Negan actually kills Abraham Ford first. For a split second, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh, thank God," we thought. "Glenn is safe." But then Daryl Dixon, being Daryl, punched Negan.
Negan doesn't do "warnings" twice.
He turned around, looked at Glenn, and said, "Back to it." The first hit was enough to pop Glenn's eye out of its socket—a gruesome detail pulled directly from the panels of issue #100 of the comic book. While "glitching" from massive brain trauma, Glenn managed to stutter out his final words to a pregnant, horrified Maggie: "Maggie, I’ll find you."
💡 You might also like: Who is in the Cast of What Comes After Love and Why the Chemistry Works
Then Negan finished the job. It wasn't quick. It was a prolonged, messy, and deeply mean-spirited exit for the show’s most beloved person.
Why the Show Version Felt Different Than the Comics
In Robert Kirkman’s original comics, Glenn is the only one who dies in that lineup. It’s sudden, it’s horrifying, and it serves a very specific purpose: to show that Rick Grimes is no longer in charge. The world has a new owner.
The TV show tried to be "cleverer." By killing Abraham first, they gave fans a false sense of security. They "double-dipped" on the grief. While this made for shocking television, many critics (and fans) felt it was "torture porn." It felt like the writers were just trying to see how much they could make the audience suffer.
Steven Yeun has been pretty open about his feelings on this. In various interviews, he’s mentioned that Glenn never quite got his "fair due" in terms of solo development or marketing until he was on his way out. He loved the character, but even he noted that the death felt "gratuitous" because it just kept going.
The "Dumpster" Problem
You can't talk about Glenn's death without mentioning the dumpster. A few episodes prior, the show made it look like Glenn was being torn apart by walkers after Nicholas shot himself and fell on top of him. The internet spent weeks analyzing frame-by-frame footage to prove he crawled under a dumpster.
He survived.
Because the show had already played the "Glenn is dead" card and then took it back, his actual death felt like a "fuck you" to some viewers. It felt manipulative. If you fake-kill a character once, you better have a damn good reason to actually kill them for real shortly after.
The Ratings Cliff: Did Glenn's Death Kill the Show?
Numbers don't lie, but they do tell a complicated story.
The Season 7 premiere pulled in over 17 million viewers. That’s Super Bowl-adjacent territory for a scripted cable show. But by the end of that season? They were down to about 10 or 11 million. That's a massive drop.
Some argue the show was already getting "stale." Maybe. But Glenn’s death was the definitive "jump the shark" moment for a huge portion of the base. It wasn't just that he died—characters die in The Walking Dead all the time. It was the way it happened. It felt hopeless. It felt like the showrunners were saying, "If you like someone, we're going to make sure their end is as miserable as possible."
🔗 Read more: Why the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Rating Still Messes With Our Heads
- Emotional exhaustion: Fans were tired of the "misery loop."
- Loss of the Moral Compass: With Glenn gone, the show became significantly darker and lost its light.
- The Negan Factor: While Jeffrey Dean Morgan is charismatic as hell, the "Negan Era" started with such a high level of cruelty that some people just couldn't stomach rooting for the show anymore.
How to Process the Legacy of Glenn Rhee
If you're rewatching or just getting into the show, Glenn’s death is a hurdle. It’s the point where the show transitions from a survival drama to a war epic. It changes Maggie forever, turning her from a survivor into a leader (and eventually a cold-blooded tactician).
Glenn's final words, "I'll find you," weren't just a random brain-damaged mumble. Steven Yeun interpreted them as a callback to all the times they were separated and found their way back to each other. It was his way of saying that even in death, he’d be looking for her. It’s beautiful and devastating.
What You Should Do Next
If you’re struggling with the brutality of that scene or wondering if it's worth continuing the series, here is how you should handle it:
- Watch the "Making Of" Features: Seeing Steven Yeun out of makeup, laughing with the cast, helps break the "trauma" of the scene. It reminds you it’s a job and they’re all friends.
- Read the Comics: If the show felt too "manipulative" with the cliffhangers, the comics handle the pacing much better. Issue #100 is still a gut punch, but it feels more like a necessary story beat than a ratings ploy.
- Check out Steven Yeun's later work: Honestly, the best "revenge" for Glenn's death is seeing what Yeun did afterward. Go watch Minari or Beef. He’s an incredible actor who was arguably too big for the show by the time he left.
- Skip the Gore if you need to: There is no shame in fast-forwarding. If you know what happens, you don't need to see the practical effects to understand the emotional weight.
Glenn's death remains a landmark in TV history. It's the moment the "Golden Age" of The Walking Dead ended for many, but it's also a testament to how much we can care about a fictional pizza delivery boy who just wanted to keep his friends alive. He didn't die because he was weak; he died because he was the heart of the group, and Negan knew that to break Rick, he had to stop that heart from beating.